Translation of abstract (English)

The subject of the thesis is Picasso’s preparatory drawings for wheel-thrown ceramic shapes made between 1946 and 1948 and their transposition to anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sculptural vases. The method is a systematic analysis of these ceramics followed by a study in order to reveal the particular significance of this body of Picasso’s work. The intention is to study ceramics from Picasso’s own viewpoint, given that he did not see it as a minor art form but rather as the equal of painting and sculpture. The aim is to create the conditions for a serious art historical evaluation of Picasso’s ceramics. The first chapter recalls the status of ceramics as a decorative art form in the period from late eighteenth century up to the transformation of the discipline by Paul Gauguin a century later. Further the actual classifications of Picasso’s ceramic output are questioned because they have been previously assessed in a somewhat biased and contradictory manner. The second part of the thesis questions the still predominant view of Picasso’s casual interest in ceramics after World War II by following chronologically his encounters with ceramics since his youth. A special focus is made on his collaborations before 1946 with at least three ceramicists including Paco Durrio in the period 1902-06, Llorens Artigas in the early twenties and Jean van Dongen in 1929. The third chapter demonstrates that numerous designs for volumetric ceramics Picasso prepared in sketches and drawings in the period from 1946 to 1948, are part of the artist’s new visual idiom which he elaborated in the graphic media during the year 1945. The anthropomorphic and zoomorphic ceramics are the transposition of this idiom into the third dimension and are analyzed from different viewpoints: morphological, typological and iconographical. Picasso himself referred to them as “structural pots” and he was inspired by ancient sculptural vases which have been used for millennia by a great number of civilisations as votive or libation vessels as well as burial urns. Particular objects which are on display in the Louvre Museum in Paris and which have been published in books which Picasso is known to have consulted are presented and described individually with respect to their functions and original context. Further the direct relationship with several ceramics by Picasso is described. After having demonstrated the close relationship between Picasso’s “structural pots” and the ceramic tradition, Picasso’s concept of the “plastic metaphor” is the centre of interest. The artist’s own explanation of this concept consists in the morphological and structural similarity between a human or animal body and the body of a vase or a similar object which comprise a hollow inner space and a containing function. The practice of using objects as a means of figuration started with Cubism when Picasso had already introduced everyday materials in the collages and employed real objects in his relief paintings and sculptures. One of his main artistic concerns from his Cubist period onwards was the relationship between reality and representation which took concrete shape in the exploration of the relationship between object and image. Picasso continued in his post-Cubist phases to use objects as formal substitutes for mimetic representation. Further analogies and convergences between Picasso’s volumetric ceramics and his sculptures are analyzed to demonstrate: the ambivalence of a visual sign in a representational system, the permutation of negative and positive volumes, the polychrome finish and the resulting modification of a plastic form, the individual sculpture in the round and the sculptures of assembled volumetric forms. Chapter IV describes that by using wheel-thrown ceramics for his artistic purposes instead of traditional sculpture, Picasso understood that the possibilities of signification can be substantially enlarged. The symbolism of the vessel had been used by Picasso earlier and in the period which preceded his ceramic sculptural vessel production and the evidence describes how this must be taken into account concerning the meaning of this body of Picasso’s work. Similarly in his interest in primitive art after 1907, when in addition to shapes and styles he largely adopted the animistic, magic content as well, Picasso not only relied on the formal content of the universal ceramics tradition but, filtered through his individual experience, he brought up to date its lost content of meaning and introduced it into the context of modern art. The vase as useful object has been used by mankind for several millennia for very different purposes, extending from household use to sacrificial vessel, burial urn, to archetypal symbol. The body of the vase offered itself to Picasso, at a time when the very concept of the painted image itself was threatened by the triumph of abstract art, as a way to readdress the merging of image and object.